Posts Tagged Plugins
Just A Tweet plugin
For another site of mine I needed a way to display the latest Tweet in the header. Sure, there are probably hundreds of Twitter plugins for WordPress. And there’s also code all over the internet to do the same. But what I couldn’t find was one that cached.
Without caching each time the page was viewed my server would have had to hit Twitter and parse out the JSON; not a good solution. So this little plugin caches the request into the options table and only refreshes when needed. By default it’s every 5 minutes, but you can change that.
Usage
Upload the plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate.
Insert <?php just_a_tweet(‘username’); ?> into your theme where you’d like it to show up.
The just_a_tweet takes 4 parameters.
$twitterUser – Required – The Twitter user name of the account you want to use
$cacheAge – Optional – The number of minutes to wait until the cache is considered stale. Defaults to 5
$forceRefresh – Optional – If true, then the caching is not done. Defaults to false
$echo – Optional = If true the tweet is echoed. The function returns the tweet either way.
Download
Download from the WordPress plugin library
Link Footnotes plugin
Link Footnotes is a tiny, simple WordPress plugin that will create a list of all the external links in your posts and pages and append it to the bottom of your page.
Once activated, there is no work required on your part. The plugin takes care of parsing any external links out of your content and adding them to the list.
Options
Default On – You can decide whether you want the plugin to display links by default. Either way you set this, it can be overridden on individual posts using a meta fields on your posts.
Heading – Allows you to set HTML displayed above your links. Default is <h2>Links</h2>
Meta Fields
If there is content in either of these meta fields then they’ll trigger. lf_off takes precedence over lf_on.
lf_on – Force the links to display, even if default is off
lf_off – Force the links not to display
Download
You can download the Link Footnotes plugin from the WordPress plugin library.
Auto Future Post WordPress plugin
Looking for a way to automatically schedule posts for X number of days past your current latest post?
On another blog I write a handful of posts at a time and schedule them out over several days. But I have to keep going back and forth to the post list to check dates. This plugin adds a link to the new post page that will automatically set the date for the post you’re working on based on the last post on your site. It’s a subtle little link. Take a look at the screen shot to the right. Notice where it says ‘Auto’ next to ‘Edit’. Clicking that will run an Ajax call that will get the next date.
Options
Two sets of options for you.
The start and end time are the earliest and latest times respectively that you want posts published. The plugin will pick a random time somewhere in between the two.
The day different between the last post and the newly scheduled post will be somewhere between min days and max days away from the current latest date. In the example above the next post will always be 2 days after the current latest, but if you want a little more randomness you can enter different numbers.
One note: The plugin does not necessarily use the date of the last post. If there is a future dated post it will schedule based on that date. If there aren’t any future dated posts it will date based on the current date.
Download
rTwit – Insert any Twitter feed into a post
For another site I needed a way to insert Twitter feeds belonging to the developer of software that I’m blogging about. The problem was that every existing plugin I found would only work with a single Twitter account, or stored each call in a single cache. Not quite what I needed.
What I did need was a way to select a Twitter account, get the most recent tweets, and cache those results to keep from going over the 150 request per hour limit imposed by Twitter. And, of course, it helps page load time to pull from a cache whenever possible.
attachmentList plugin for WordPress
This is a quick and simple plugin I cooked up for a site of mine. I needed a way to allow site authors to attach files and have them available for download without the author having to do anything other than attach.
To add a file simply add it as a post attachment just like you would with an image. Instead of inserting into the post you just close the media window once it’s been uploaded. You may want to take a look at the mime-config plugin if you’re going to be uploading non web file types. WordPress tends to not like authors uploading some formats.
PNG icons are from http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/